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| Courtesy of Flickr |
A number of tech startups from Apple to HP and others got their start in the humble garage. Our own city of Jacksonville Florida has been the birthplace and host, to one of the world's first creativity, startup and crowdfunding festivals called OneSpark. With all the growth in the tech industries, I can't help but be excited about startups. So in this article, I will countdown the top 5 Garage Gurus of all time. We will also look at where the next titans of tech are likely to come from as well as what the garage startup has evolved into now that tech business incubators and cowork space abound.
When it comes to the Internet everyone is familiar with the
three letters WWW. Well, today we are going to talk about the three G’s,
since if it weren’t for these top five Garage Gurus, there would never have
been an Internet in the first place. A number of startups from Apple to
HP got their start in the humble garage. Some of these made their owners
billionaires. All of them changed the ways in which the world works.
Let’s take a look at the top five garage businesses in our countdown starting with
HP my 5th pick:
#5 – Hewlett Packard
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| "HP"-Garage in Palo Alto (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
#4 – Google
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| Courtesy of googlesystem.blogspot.com |
#3 – Disney
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| Courtesy of disneyinstitute.com |
#2 – Apple
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| image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org |
#1 – Amazon
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| Courtesy of www.cinematography.com |
Building Something from Nothing
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| English: "Sopa da pedra" (stone soup) served in Almeirim, Portugal. Português: Sopa da pedra servida em Almeirim, em Portuga. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Like the story “Stone Soup,” where an itinerant stranger tricks
the town folk into sharing their food, all of these people literally made
something out of nothing. Think about it. When Jeff Bezos started
Amazon, major booksellers didn’t regard him as a threat. Heck, it took
him almost a year to sell his first book. When Jobs and Wozniak tried to
sell the Apple 1, it was little more than a computer kit that sold for $666.66
($2,763 in 2015 dollars.)
What turned these businesses from a curiosity to an industry
were several things, including a little bit of luck and a ton of pluck.
Part businessmen, part showmen, each and every one of these individuals ― while
regarded as genius innovators today ― had to suffer the slings and arrows not only
of their competitors, but of their peers as well. (“Go on, get out of here boy,
yer botherin’ me!”) Yet persist they did to become icons of industry,
proving the old saw that success is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.”
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| MakerBot Industries (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Today this trend continues as other tinkerers piece
together hardware and software in their garages, hoping to be the next tech
sensation. A great example of this is MakerBot. MakerBot, a 3D printer manufactures started
out as an open-source kit company out of a garage and now is a major player in
the burgeoning 3D printer market. You can even buy their products a SAN club.
While many of these future Garage Gurus will be products
of universities, others can come out of the blue. Jack Ma, CEO of
Alibaba in China, founded his company in his apartment in 1999. He claims to
have coined the name while sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop. On
September 5, 2014 the company went public, raising more than $20 billion,
making it the largest IPO in history.
Industries to keep an eye on in 2015 are offering such
inventions as 3D Printing, Personal Robotics and Drones, Wearable Computing,
Battery & Power Technology and Cybersecurity and Robotic Exoskeletons.
While the next wave of Garage Gurus could come from one of these areas, or from
some other innovation such as nanotechnology is anybody’s guess. What is
certain is that some of the most profound changes to our society will almost
certainly have its start in the most humble of beginnings… the garage.
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Thanks for sharing your time with me.
Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida. You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio
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I can't even change my car's oil in the garage without making a mess.
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